Generation Wealth

Generation Wealth

Director:
Lauren Greenfield

2018, USA, 106 Minutes, DCP, Rated R

Program Notes

For the past 25 years, acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles, Thin, kids+money, #likeagirl) has travelled the world, documenting with ethnographic precision and an artist’s sensitivity a vast range of cultural movements and moments. Yet, after so much seeking and searching, she realized that much of her work pointed at one uniting phenomenon: wealth culture. With her new film, Generation Wealth, she puts the pieces of her life’s work together for in an incendiary investigation into the pathologies that have created the richest society the world has ever seen. Spanning consumerism, beauty, gender, body commodification, aging and more, Greenfield has created a comprehensive cautionary tale about a culture heading straight for the cliff’s edge. Generation Wealth, simultaneously a deeply personal journey, rigorous historical essay, and raucously entertaining expose, bears witness to the global boom-bust economy, the corrupted American Dream and the human costs of capitalism, narcissism and greed.

“From an Atlanta strip club where cash-crazy dancers rake bills off the floors, to a school where aspirational Chinese learn to pronounce essential phrases like Dolce & Gabbana, Ms. Greenfield’s work pokes insistently at the psychological spaces we hope money and status can fill.” — Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times

“The abundance on display may be physical in form — worn, driven, accessorized, surgically enhanced. But it’s matched by an equally teeming, unquenchable emptiness.” — Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

“Greenfield wraps up this compulsively watchable movie with observations of family love and some of its characters striving for redemption and/or an honest living.” — Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

OFFICIAL SELECTION:
Sundance Film Festival
Berlin International Film Festival
South by Southwest Film Festival